Blogroll

Wednesday, February 07, 2018

Now, another memo is in the pipeline, this one produced by the committee's Democratic minority, and things are much quieter.

First, in a sharp contrast to last week, Republicans joined Democrats to vote unanimously to release the Democratic memo. Second, there haven't been high-profile warnings about endangering national security. And third, there haven't been alerts that the memo has critical omissions.

All that raises eyebrows among some Republicans on Capitol Hill who have read the Democratic memo. They say it contains much more classified information than the Republican memo did. The GOP paper was written so that it had a minimum of classified information in it, they explain, and indeed, after inspecting it, the FBI asked for just one small change.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

The fact that this machine is now being considered a tool for conditioning its users, on sexual harassment or anything, gives me the creeps. You can bet the social justice warriors in Silicon Valley won’t stop there.

Monday, January 22, 2018

The two FBI officials involved in a scandal over anti-Trump text messages referred to a “secret society” on the day after President Trump’s 2016 election win, two Republican lawmakers who have reviewed the exchanges said on Monday.

Sunday, January 07, 2018

With all new technologies there are predictions of how good it will be for humankind, or how bad it will be. A common thread that I have observed is how people tend to underestimate how long new technologies will take to be adopted after proof of concept demonstrations. I pointed to this as the seventh of seven deadly sins of predicting the future of AI.

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Wherever there are patterns and relevant data, deep learning is being applied. Neural networks are no longer the second-best solution to the problem. Often they are the best, and in many instances it is we humans who have taken second place. It is the computer that has the beautiful mind.

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

The recovery of a data recorder may have identified the cause of a fatal derailment of an Amtrak train in Washington state yesterday. NTSB board member Bella Dinh-Zarr tells CBS News that the device reveals that the train took a curve at almost three times faster than its speed limit. “How is it that a train was going 80 miles an hour,” Savannah Guthrie asks, “around a curve where the speed limit was 30?”

Sunday, December 17, 2017

eticulous research, deep study of case law, and intricate argument-building—lawyers have used similar methods to ply their trade for hundreds of years. But they’d better watch out, because artificial intelligence is moving in on the field.

Just as the 18-year-old girls were realizing they were too big for the tiny conveyances — which belonged to a 6-year-old boy — a woman came running after them saying, “That’s my kid’s stuff.” Borden and her friend immediately dropped the bike and scooter and walked away.

Courts, banks, and other institutions are using automated data analysis systems to make decisions about your life. Let’s not leave it up to the algorithm makers to decide whether they’re doing it appropriately.

Even so, all this is a small part of what could reasonably be defined as real artificial intelligence. Patrick Winston, a professor ofAI and computer science at MIT, says it would be more helpful to describe the developments of the past few years as having occurred in “computational statistics” rather than in AI. One of the leading researchers in the field, Yann LeCun, Facebook’s director of AI, said at a Future of Work conference at MIT in November that machines are far from having “the essence of intelligence.” That includes the ability to understand the physical world well enough to make predictions about basic aspects of it—to observe one thing and then use background knowledge to figure out what other things must also be true. Another way of saying this is that machines don’t have common sense.

Take the development of copyright laws, which followed the creation of the printing press. When first introduced in the 1400s, the printing press was disruptive to political and religious elites because it allowed knowledge to spread and experiments to be shared. It helped spur the decline of the Holy Roman Empire, through the spread of Protestant writings; the rise of nationalism and nation-states, due to rising cultural self-awareness; and eventually the Renaissance. Debates about the ownership of ideas raged for about 300 years before the first statutes were enacted by Great Britain.

Tuesday, December 05, 2017

Mueller issued a subpoena to Germany’s largest lender several weeks ago, forcing the bank to submit documents on its relationship with Trump and his family, according to a person briefed on the matter, who asked not to be identified because the action has not been announced.

A colleague of mine with deep experience defending big fraud cases is convinced this is what Mueller will dig into and that it will probably be Trump's downfall. All people at Trump's level in finance have irregularities and Mueller's bound to come across something.

Thursday, November 23, 2017

To get over this hurdle, the developers’ core idea was for AlphaGo to play the policy network against itself, to get an estimate of how likely a given board position was to be a winning one. That probability of a win provided a rough valuation of the position. (In practice, AlphaGo used a slightly more complex variation of this idea.) Then, AlphaGo combined this approach to valuation with a search through many possible lines of play, biasing its search toward lines of play the policy network thought were likely. It then picked the move that forced the highest effective board valuation.

Even as machines known as “deep neural networks” have learned to converse, drive cars, beat video games and Go champions, dream, paint pictures and help make scientific discoveries, they have also confounded their human creators, who never expected so-called “deep-learning” algorithms to work so well. No underlying principle has guided the design of these learning systems, other than vague inspiration drawn from the architecture of the brain (and no one really understands how that operates either).